Big-data investors look for the next Splunk

April 20, 2012|Sarah McBride and Alistair Barr | Reuters

Hortonworks: Formed from the team that helped develop Hadoop as an open-source project inside Yahoo several years ago. The company is trying to get Hadoop used by as many people as possible, and it boldly predicts the technology will process half of the world's data within the next five years.

Hortonworks has support, training and partner programs to help other companies learn how to use Hadoop. CEO Rob Bearden was COO SpringSource and JBoss, two successful open source companies. The CTO and co-founder is Eric Baldeschwieler, who led the evolution of Hadoop at Yahoo.

Hortonworks has been coy about its funding. However, Benchmark Capital general partner Peter Fenton is an investor and sits on the company's board of directors.

Sumo Logic: Think of this company as a next-generation Splunk, building in cloud-based capabilities right from the start. Currently, Splunk is premise-based, meaning it uses on-site computer servers rather than remote, cloud-based servers.

The company raised $15 million earlier this year from investors including Greylock and Sutter Hill Ventures. Chandna at Greylock Partners says on top of its existing business, Sumo Logic's cloud-based technologies mean it could one day sell anonymized industry insights gleaned from across the spectrum of companies it does business with.

Inrix: This company represents one of many industry-specific big data plays venture capitalists are making. It uses several hundred thousand receivers based around the roads to gather millions of pieces of data every hour on factors such as how fast cars are moving, whether they are slowing down or speeding up, whether windshields are on, and so on.

Together, the data gives a complete picture of traffic patterns now, and likely ones in the future. The data can be sold to entities ranging from GPS makers to municipalities who need to plan roads. Its latest funding round was last year, when it raised $37 million led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and August Capital.

10gen: The company develops MongoDB, an open-source database that can handle lots of different types of data, partly because it does not require information to be store in traditional tables and rows.

10gen was founded by former DoubleClick Founder and CTO Dwight Merriman and former DoubleClick engineer and ShopWiki Founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz.

10gen raised $20 million in Series D funding last year from Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital and Union Square Ventures.

MetaMarkets: This company helps online media businesses analyze high volumes of streaming data in areas such as online advertising, gaming and social media.

MetaMarkets is run by Michael Driscoll, who led Dataspora, which delivers data science to telecom companies, insurers and retail banks.

MetaMarkets raised $6 million last year from investors including IA Ventures, Village Ventures and True Ventures.